An unusual gift….

           For the last two weeks, I am extremely busy.  These days, I am in charge of a month’s training of a group of foreign participants.  They are all middle level officers from various National Ministries in their Country.  Being the coordinator of such a training course brings multi tasks at a time, literally guiding the participants throughout the course.  I have to do a lot of planning and preparation to make the transportation arrangements for the participants to reach the various venues everyday. I try my best to provide them all kind of help to make their life easy and memorable in this foreign country. 

Fortunately, so far everything is going on smoothly.  The batch is very cooperating and responsible.  Even though, many of them have serious language problem in our country, they are not leaving any chance to explore the beauty of our country and add to the economy of our country by ‘shopping’. 

Today is very critical for me.  Before leaving home, I once again checked my bag to ensure that I have taken all the necessary material for my today’s ‘performance’.   Today, our group is going to one of the State Government Offices and they will be having two important sessions on ‘Sample surveys conducted by the State’ there.  But, the lectures will be in Hindi (usually most of the lecturers for foreign participants were in English) as that office decided so and my role is to be an interpreter for the sessions.  For the last few days, I was preparing hardly for this day.  I had translated all the material for presentation into English and had gone through it many times.  I tried to read some references also to gather some knowledge, but being a student of ‘Arts’, I miserably found that all those theories about sampling and surveys were not at all going into my head.

On the way to the training hall, some of the participants also noticed me tensed.  I told, “I am not worried about the interpretation job, but I am worried about the subject, I don’t know, how the lecturer will proceed?  If she deviates from the notes provided earlier, it will be a difficult task for me.  And I am really afraid, how you will follow it”.  They tried to cheer me up.

The session is about to start, my seat is ready on the stage, I kept all my literature and my digital dictionary also on the table.  I distributed the English version of the lecture notes to all.  The session started, after some informal welcome statements, the lecturer started the topic.  To my luck, she was displaying the presentation and was exactly following the course material she provided earlier.  My tension melted away soon, and I was confidently doing the interpretation.

But, after some time, I could see some of the participants slipping into sleep, and some trying their best to keep their attention in the class.  The lecturer also noticed this and to make the session active, she invited questions.  Then started a rain of queries, I stopped them, and requested them to be one by one.  Any way, I feel I could successfully handle this unexpected situation also.  As the session ended, I was quite relieved and satisfied.  I accompanied the lecturer to the office room and she also commended my efforts.

I was eager to hear the participants, I was anxious to know, ‘whether they could follow, it is very important, as they will be having evaluation tests based on it at the end of the course’.  Their affirmative responses brought the smile back into my face.

I saw, the participant from Tajikisthan was coming near to me; he has a piece of paper in his hand.  He extended it to me saying, ‘in memory of your successful and wonderful performance today’.  I opened it.  Oh… unbelievable. Let me share the gift with you here.

 Of course, this gift is very unusual and special to me….